Eric'o'theque

Eric Richards' place of techno (as in technology) happiness, rants, and corporate love.

Browsing Posts published in September, 2007

Karen Wong has a great post about one of the coolest new features to Windows Live Photo Gallery: photo acquisition. Yesh! Photo acquisition can be cool. There’s a step where, looking at time groupings, we help to put your photos together in groups that make sense.

For instance, say on this coming Saturday, you first take some shots of the morning sun hitting dew sparkling in a spider’s web, followed later by some lunchtime shots of fruit at the farmers market, and then you end your photography for the day with some snaps of the sunset. When you import your photos with WLPG, we’ll group these three events together and you can name them and tag them uniquely right there.

Nice.

One principal thing for you to know about this:

Previously Imported Items
We know that a lot of users don’t delete their photos/videos on their camera after importing.  In the Vista photo gallery, we automatically detected items that were already imported into the gallery, and did not import them again to eliminate duplicates.  In Live, we will show these items in the ‘Review, organize, and group items to import’ option, but by default they will be unchecked.  You can go ahead and check these items if you’d like to re-import them into your gallery.

In this case, you might see the text “There are 0 new items to import” just because you’ve already imported everything. But like Karen says, you can re-import them by checking the group.

More here: Microsoft Photography & Video Blog : Changes to Photo/Video Import in the Live Photo Gallery Beta .

 Direct from Michael Gartenberg over at Jupiter Research:

Microsoft quietly released this one into beta and so far I’m liking it a lot. There’s a lot of similarity with the Vista Photo gallery app, and that’s a good thing and it goes beyond it in a number of ways. Must have addition for XP users and a nice upgrade for Vista owners. Get it here along with a host of other stuff or follow the links to just get the app alone.

Michael Gartenberg – Windows Live Photo Gallery

A thread on Channel9 about Windows Live Photo Gallery: Re: Windows Live Photo Gallery rocks! . Call-outs:

  • Yeah: import wizard.
  • Yeah: panoramic stitching.
  • Ouch: running 1024×768
  • Ouch: concerns over Windows Desktop Search running.
  • Ouch: no support for installing any of the Windows Live Betas on x64.

Seems as though there was a popular techie news item about iPods today. Or something. Anyway, here’s what Techmeme is currently picking up about the Windows Live Suite release: 

Windows Live Wire:

Test drive the new Windows Live suite  —  You’ve probably already read about some changes we’re making to Windows Live, and have seen some of your services change over the past few weeks.  Starting later today, you’ll be able to test out the new suite of Windows Live software at http://get.live.com/wl/all.

Link Search: Google, Ask, Technorati, Sphere, and IceRocket

Discussion:

Brandon LeBlanc / The Windows Experience Blog: Announcing the Windows Live suite with unified installer

Peter Galli / eWEEK.com: Microsoft Delivers Updated Windows Live Suite

Ryan / CyberNet Technology News: Windows Live Writer now has XHTML Support

Ed Oswald / BetaNews: Microsoft Releases Suite of Windows Live Software

Kip Kniskern / LiveSide: Windows Live Suite announced – Update

Mary Jo Foley / All about Microsoft: Microsoft releases Windows Live suite beta with common installer

Writer Zone: Windows Live Writer Beta 3 Now Available

Jason Cross / ExtremeTech: Microsoft Announces Live Suite and Installer

RELATED:

Robert McLaws / Windows Vista Edition:
New ‘Live Suite’ Beta Doesn’t Support Vista x64

Link Search: Google, Ask, Technorati, Sphere, and IceRocket

Discussion:

Ryan / CyberNet Technology News: New Live Installer, Live Writer, & Photo Gallery

Elizabeth Montalbano / InfoWorld: Microsoft ties Windows Live services to OS

From: Techmeme: Test drive the new Windows Live suite (Windows Live Wire) .

A nice overview of the Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta by Brandon LeBlanc: The Windows Experience Blog : Edit and Share Photos and Videos with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Brandon quickly covers the major new features in the Beta.

And note not only are the new features in the Windows Live Photo Gallery client but we also have a team working on the web end for Windows Live Spaces, adding support for viewing albums full screen and more, like being able to download each photo directly (the high resolution, printable version, if it was uploaded) and going into full-screen slideshow mode.

Get a Live-ID if you don’t have one and take ‘er for a spin!

Please be sure to read before installing the release.

The first thing folks seem to be running into is that there is not a Vista 64-bit installer for this Beta release: Windows Live Beta release notes for Windows Live Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Writer, Toolbar, and OneCare Family Safety.

Announcing the new Windows Live Suite Beta:

Today we’re releasing beta versions of a new generation of Windows Live software designed for your Windows PC that makes it easier than ever to get connected to Windows Live or other services. This suite of software includes e-mail (Windows Live Mail), photo sharing (Windows Live Photo Gallery), a great publishing tool that lets you post directly to your blog (Windows Live Writer), parental controls (Windows Live OneCare Family Safety), a new version of Windows Live Messenger (8.5), and more.

:

I really hope you’ll download the betas today at http://get.live.com/wl/all

From Chris Jones’ post Windows Live Wire: Test drive the new Windows Live suite. Windows Live Photo Gallery not only has new features compared to Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery (more details later) but also works on Windows XP!

Niiiiiiice article by The John Markoff:

This week, [Microsoft] plans to turn that strategy upside down, making available free software that connects its Windows operating system to software services delivered on the Internet, a practice increasingly referred to as “cloud” computing. The initiative is part of an effort to connect Windows more seamlessly to a growing array of Internet services.

The strategy is a major departure for Microsoft, which primarily sells packaged software for personal computers. With this new approach, Microsoft hopes to shield its hundreds of millions of software customers from competitors like Google and Salesforce.com, which already offer software applications through the Internet.

Software via the Internet: Microsoft in ‘Cloud’ Computing – New York Times